My fellow Steemians,
Welcome to my weekly witness update. This is something I do every Friday as some other witnesses do too. Hopefully, this will keep my followers and the community up-to-date with what I've been up to. Ultimately, I hope I may gain your witness approval vote.
The template used here was devised by 
1. Accomplished the week of 2016-12-09
- Wrapped up the Steemit feature to have the blog tab split out into a blog tab and a resteemed tab in a user's blog. See the post Resteemed Tab has been Developed! - With steemd Backend Change!.
- This included a change to the steemd backend to extend the relevant API calls to have an optional filter, summarized in the GitHub issue get_discussions_by_blog to filter resteems #581. The pull request with the changes is at get_discussions_by_blog to filter resteems #678. And the pull request for the changes to the steemit.com codebase is at Split Blog tab into Blog and Resteemed tabs #819.
- Monitored and tweaked all my deployed steemd instances to ensure everything was running smoothly on the new hard fork. As the hardfork changed the mining algorithm, the queue is no longer dominated by two miners possibly with an exploit and mining is again possible. It is very likely that this will only last for a short time, so I started my miner again to take the opportunity. I've been able to find some pows but with the economic changes that came with the hardfork, the miner reward has been lowered.
2. Upcoming projects/goals
- Follow up on any issues that may be found with my code submission to the resteemed tab.
- Continue on the next set of changes to the "Welcome to Steemit" page.
- Continue to spend time on the Steemit.com codebase.
- Continue with
's wish list and trying to implement some of the items there.
- Continue being active on Steemit, Steemit Chat, and GitHub.
3. Thoughts from this week
What a week!
The hardfork on Tuesday was a big event anticipated for a while, after weeks and three release candidates. As steemd now uses chainbase, deployment is different and many witnesses were running into problems when syncing and indexing. Disk usage could go randomly high and cause wear and lag. Many witnesses missed blocks.
There were a few issues with the steem code and some affected the steemit.com frontend as well. However, there have been a ton of code submissions and fixes this week on the two repos on GitHub. As I watch both of them, I stay up-to-date with what changes have been made and get to learn in the process. I have noticed the core dev team has started to use weekly milestones to organize issues and pull requests! And of course, we will get an official roadmap near or at the beginning of the next year. Exciting!
STEEM price has been rising. It is great to see it trading well, hopefully we continue to see higher prices.
Finally, thanks to everyone who have voted for me as witness. I have moved up a few spots, currently at 39! Thanks to all who support me and like what I do. It is all very much appreciated!
4. Previous week's update, other links
- bitcoiner - Witness Update #11 - 2016-12-02
- bitcoiner.me - Full Node Details, Live Node Test, Witness Posts, Worldwide Connections Map, Witness Schedule Live Visualization
